Lee Miller: War Photographer

British Vogue photographer Lee Miller smiles in combat fatigues in Alsace 1944. It was said that no soldier could resist a photographer with a fashion model’s striking beauty. The photo was taken by her friend and colleague, Life magazine’s David E. Scherman. [Source: NYT]

Lee Miller sneaks a bath in Hitler’s apartment after the fall of Berlin, 1945. She later explained blithely, “I had his address in my pocket for years.” [Photo by David E. Scherman; source NYT]

“She got Scherman to photograph her, unclothed, in Hitler’s bath,” writes Lucy Davies in The Telegraph. “Her boots are placed in the foreground, covered in the dust of Dachau, which she had visited the day before. The juxtaposition belonged to that Surrealist universe in which dream and coincidence reign.”

She hit her stride during the war. Her war photography is some of the best I have ever seen. [Her son Anthony] Penrose later published another book, Lee Miller’s War, which shows her pictures of airstrikes, battles, a top-secret napalm strike. But it also has pictures of civilians: women collaborators; a lost child perched on a road sign looking exhausted and terrified; a young German girl soon after her suicide. Along with Scherman, Miller followed the Allied advance through Europe after D-Day, going everywhere, frightened by nothing.

“Her photographs shocked people out of their comfort zone,” said Mark Haworth-Booth, who is the curator of The Art of Lee Miller, a retrospective of her life, which is currently at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and will be traveling to the Philadelphia Museum of Art in January [2008].

Haworth-Booth added: “She had a chip of ice in her heart. She got very close to things. Margaret Bourke-White was far away from the fighting, but Lee was close. That’s what makes the difference — Lee was prepared to shock.”

She arrived in Paris on the day of liberation and followed the Allies into Germany. After Germany’s surrender, she wrote one of her most passionate articles for Vogue, “Germans Are Like This.” Haworth-Booth said, “She wanted people to see how amazingly a fashion magazine like Vogue could publish something so brutal.” She then headed to Eastern Europe to see the aftermath of war.

Penrose believes that this is possibly when Miller snapped. She was disappointed and angered by what war had done: how it had broken down society. In one notebook, I looked at the notes she wrote to accompany perhaps her most powerful war photo: of a child dying in a hospital in Vienna. The hospital was equipped with everything but badly needed drugs. Miller sat by the bed with a doctor and a nun, helpless as the tiny child faded away. Later, she slashed out the lead to her story for Vogue in the notebook, her pencil marks angry and heavy. Reading her notes, 60 years later, I can still feel how furious, how sad she was.

Letting Go of Sight

I’ve canoed on Lake Superior for almost as many years as I’ve been losing eyesight. I return year after year like a migrating loon to learn the other side of a slow, uncertain process that we could call “going blind.” After 35 years with the lake as my teacher, I know what lies on the other side. I call it letting go of sight. Read Big Water. See more about the Great Lakes.

Not This Pig

If there is an emerging genetic underclass, I could run for class president or class clown. Read more in Not This Pig (2003).

Media in Transition @ MiT

Disabled Americans today have to negotiate for the kinds of accommodations made for FDR, and the caveat “reasonable accommodation” is built into the law. President Franklin Roosevelt did not have to negotiate. He could summon vast resources of the federal government – money as well as brains – to accomplish the work of disability. And it was accomplished with such thoroughness and efficiency that its scale could be called the Accessibility-Industrial Complex had it been directed toward public accommodations and not solely the needs of a single man. Read FDR and the Hidden Work of Disability [MiT8 2013]

Shepard Fairey claimed that his posterization of a copyrighted AP news photo of Barack Obama was a transformative work protected by the fair use doctrine. In other words, it was a shape-shifter. I claim fair use, too, when I reproduce and transform copyrighted works into media formats that are accessible to me as a blind reader. Read Shape-Shifters in the Fair Use Lab [MiT6 2009]

The social engineers who created a system for licensing beggars in New York never imagined that a blind woman had culture or could make culture. She herself may not have imagined it, either. In the moment when Paul Strand photographed her surreptitiously on the street in 1916, he could not have expected that one day blind photographers would reverse the camera’s gaze. Read Curiosity & The Blind Photographer. [MiT5 2007]